AT LARGE: Ghosts of the past linger in Scottsboro

SCOTTSBORO | We moved to Scottsboro 50 years ago, and I haven't lived here regularly since 1966 when I went off to Birmingham-Southern College.

By Tommy StevensonSpecial to The Tuscaloosa News

SCOTTSBORO | We moved to Scottsboro 50 years ago, and I haven't lived here regularly since 1966 when I went off to Birmingham-Southern College.But, as Neil Young said, all my changes were here.During a two-week idyll with my brother, sister-in-law and 93-year-old mother, all of whom live here, I took several long walks around to reacquaint myself with this town of 14,800, which is double what it was when I lived here in the '60s. During my wanderings, the memories came back not so much in a flood as a gentle, welling stream of both good times and some not so much.I remember after that first service presided over by my father at the First United Methodist Church following our arrival on the previous Thursday, some of our new peers approached my brother and I and asked if we wanted to go with them to the boat races that afternoon in Guntersville some 30 miles away. Sure, we said, and went on our way down Alabama Highway 79, a road I would come to know intimately over the next two years.Once in Guntersville, I found myself at the Del Monte Country Club out in the middle of Lake Guntersville on a man-made spit of land. Roaring at us were the unlimited hydroplanes that had come to race that day.With rooster tails of water thrown 50 feet in the air, the huge boats skipped like rocks as they made their turn right down the way from us and then blasted past us at 80 miles an hour. It remains to this day one of the most spectacular things I have seen in sports.Meanwhile, we remained comfortable in our beach chairs in the sun, surrounded by several young lasses in bikinis. After having escaped my father's previous assignment in drab Hueytown, a blue collar suburb of Birmingham, I felt sort of like I'd died and gone to teenage heaven.Scottsboro is in Jackson County in the northeast corner of the state. It is on the Tennessee River and at the foot of Sand Mountain, the last southern gasp of the Appalachians. The town was built around a courthouse square where there is a monthly "First Monday" trade day in which people bring in all manner of yard sale-type items to be traded and bartered.First Monday has lost some of its luster and crowds over the years, but I remember when we lived two blocks off the square in the First Methodist parsonage; the parked cars on First Monday crowded our street and beyond.I walked by our old house, which is still standing on Scott Street, but has been appropriated by the Baptists. Our church is gone now — the Methodists have built a new church southwest of the center of town.As in most towns, Scottsboro's downtown has fallen somewhat into disrepair — all the action has moved to the highways coming into and out of town. As I wandered around the square, framed by Melody Mountain just to the northwest, I noticed that the only business that seemed to be thriving amid the boarded-up storefronts was the legal one. There must be a dozen law offices in and around Scottsboro's square.Try as I might, however, I could not pick out the former home of the movie theater on the west side of the square, the one that always played an Elvis movie on Saturday night. Nor could I determine just which building had housed the record store where I shopped obsessively and where I bought my first LPs. For the record, they were "The Ray Charles Story," volume three, and "The Best of Roy Orbison."My former hometown is famous, of course, for "The Scottsboro Boys" case in the 1930s, in which several black youth were convicted of raping two white girls. The case, which went all the way to the Supreme Court, is felt in some circles to be the beginning of the modern civil rights movement; certainly the NAACP made a name for itself defending the accused, all of whom were eventually exonerated and pardoned.But despite the fact that the first trials we held in the courthouse here, the whole "Scottsboro Boys" thing has always rubbed people here the wrong way. You see, both the two girls and the accused had hopped the train on which the crimes had allegedly taken place in Tennessee — Scottsboro was just the place where the girls first reported their stories, and later, trials were held in Decatur and Huntsville.But no matter, I suppose, they will always be "The Scottsboro Boys."Down Broad Street, I found a vacant lot where the Dairy Twist used to stand and where we spent most summer nights just hanging out. It was in the crucible of those soft nights, amid my first real friends, that I believe I became myself.A pity that all that remains is an asphalt parking lot.

Tommy Stevenson is the retired associate editor of The Tuscaloosa News. Readers can email him at beebranch@yahoo.com or call 205-292-2236.

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